Saving Youngstown. Again

One U.S. president after another has promised to turn this Rust Belt city around. Now Joe Biden is planning to steer millions of dollars in federal funding to revive manufacturing. So where are the jobs?

- SHAWN DONNAN

During Youngstown, Ohio’s industrial heyday, the box-like building on West Boardman Street was home to the printing plant of the Vindicator, a venerable broadsheet that took on big business, corrupt politicians, and organized crime. Today it’s home to the future of American manufacturing—or the company behind at least one version of it: the JuggerBot Tradesman P3-44, a 3,400-pound, $225,000 3D printer built for industrial tasks such as turning thermoplastics into foundry molds. “The sheer volume of what you can do on these-style machines completely changes the game,” says Zac DiVencenzo, a Youngstown-area native who’s JuggerBot 3D’s president.

DiVencenzo grabs a felt-tipped pen, finds some empty space on a whiteboard, and begins charting up cost curves. He’s making an economic case for what’s known as additive manufacturing and for the bright future of his six-year-old startup, its six employees, and a former steel town of 65,000 people that’s been battling for decades to find a new place in a U.S. economy running away from it. “I’m just working to get Youngstown on the map,” DiVencenzo says.

For decades, this corner of Ohio has been held up by everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Donald Trump as an emblem of industrial decline and what’s gone wrong in America. A succession of presidents has promised—and failed—to turn around Youngstown, which, despite all the political attention and federal dollars lavished upon it, doesn’t have a supermarket in the residential neighborhoods closest to downtown.